women's health
kkrisberg | June 24, 2016A couple months ago, we reported on a study that found raising the minimum wage to $15 could have prevented thousands of premature deaths in New York City alone. Now comes more science on the life-saving benefits of higher wages — this one found that just a modest increase in the minimum wage could have saved the lives of hundreds of babies. It’s yet another reminder that the movement for a living wage is also a movement toward a healthier nation for all.
Published last week in the American Journal of Public Health, the study examined the impact of state-based minimum wage laws on the rate of…
kkrisberg | June 3, 2016In the first large-scale study of its kind, researchers report that sexual trauma is indeed a risk factor for suicide among military veterans and are calling on veteran health providers to continue including such trauma in suicide prevention strategies.
Published in June in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the study is the first large-scale, population-based investigation into whether military sexual trauma is a risk factor in suicide-related mortality. To conduct the study, researchers with the Veterans Affairs system analyzed data on millions of veterans who received outpatient…
kkrisberg | May 27, 2016“In my darker hours when I’m sleeping at night, that’s where I go.” Those are words from Eric Blank, senior director for public health systems at the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL), talking about the enormous difficulties that public health labs faced in confronting the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. Now he fears that without emergency federal funds and in the face of new funding cuts, Zika virus will force the nation’s critical public health lab network into that same scenario — or into something even worse.
“(Public health labs) know what they need and when they need it and yet…
lborkowski | May 18, 2016Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has signed into law the Contraceptive Equity Act, which puts the state at the forefront of efforts to reduce insurance-plan barriers to accessing multiple forms of contraception. When the law takes effect in 2018, insurance plans regulated by Maryland that provide contraceptive coverage will no longer be allowed to charge co-payments for FDA-approved contraceptive drugs, procedures, and devices. This list include vasectomies and emergency-contraceptive pills.
The law will also allow women to receive six months of oral contraceptives at a time, and will prohibit…
kkrisberg | May 17, 2016Hardly a day goes by lately without another story on companies like Uber and their model of classifying workers as independent contractors while treating them more like traditional employees and sidestepping traditional employer responsibilities. It’s a model that has serious implications for workers’ rights and wages. However, there’s another form of employment that may be even more damaging to hard-fought labor standards: subcontracting.
In March, the University of California-Berkely Labor Center released “Race to the Bottom: How Low-Road Subcontracting Affects Working Conditions in…
kkrisberg | May 12, 2016With near constant news on the threat of Zika virus and a quickly growing evidence base detailing the virus’ devastating impact on fetal brain development, you’d think Congress could get its act together to make sure our public health system is fully prepared and equipped to confront the mosquito-borne disease. Sadly, you’d be wrong.
It’s been nearly three months since the White House submitted a request to Congress proposing $1.9 billion in emergency funding to support a full range of activities needed to prepare for, prevent, detect and respond to Zika in the United States. As of today, May…
kkrisberg | May 5, 2016Just in time for Mother’s Day comes more good news from the Affordable Care Act: the rate of uninsured moms caring for kids younger than 19 has dropped to its lowest rate in nearly 20 years.
According to a new analysis from the Urban Institute released this month, the rate of uninsured moms fell 3.8 percentage points between 2013 and 2014 — that’s a decline about three times as large as any of the previous year-to-year changes observed since 1997. In sheer numbers, that means about 1.6 million moms gained health insurance. To give you even more perspective, consider that uninsurance rates…
lborkowski | May 2, 2016A study in CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report last week reported that the birth rate for US teens aged 15-19 declined by 41% nationwide from 2006 to 2014. Disparities in teen birth rates also narrowed, with the birth ratio for Hispanic teens to white teens dropping from 2.9 to 2.2, and for black teens declining from 2.3 to 2.0. Because teen childbearing comes with a greater risk of negative health and economic consequences for mothers and children, this is good news for public health. But the persistence of disparities -- by geography as well as by race and ethnicity -- is still of…
kkrisberg | April 15, 2016Lead isn’t the only toxin threatening the safety of community drinking water. A recent study on water located downstream from a West Virginia fracking disposal site uncovered levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals high enough to adversely impact the aquatic animals living there. And that means human health could be at risk too.
“We can’t make any direct (human health) assumptions about this particular water,” said study co-author Susan Nagel, an associate professor in the University of Missouri School of Medicine’s Division of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women’s Health. “But we certainly…
kkrisberg | April 4, 2016In debates over air pollution control, it’s always a tug-of-war between the cost to business and the cost to public health. Late last month, a study emerged with new data for the public health column: the cost of the nation’s nearly 16,000 annual preterm births linked to air pollution is more than a whopping $5 billion.
Published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the study estimated the burden of U.S. preterm births and related costs associated with fine particulate matter (PM2.5) — a pollutant from motor vehicles and the burning of fuels such as wood and coal. While preterm birth is a…
kkrisberg | March 16, 2016At Vox, Sarah Kliff writes about the side of medical errors we rarely hear about — the doctors and nurses who make such errors and the mental health toll of living with that responsibility. In an article that explores whether health care workers are getting the support they need to deal with such experiences, Kliff begins with the story of nurse Kim Hiatt:
Kim Hiatt had worked as a nurse for 24 years when she made her first medical error: She gave a frail infant 10 times the recommended dosage of a medication. The baby died five days later.
Hiatt's mistake was an unnecessary tragedy. But what…
lborkowski | March 14, 2016Although the US still has a long way to go in preventing unintended pregnancies, an article published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine had some good news: The proportion of US pregnancies that were unintended dropped from 51% in 2008 to 45% in 2011. Lawrence B. Finer and Mia R. Zolna of the Guttmacher institute analyzed data on pregnancy intention from the National Survey of Family Growth, and note that the rate of unintended pregnancy declined for every income and education group and all racial and ethnic groups. Disparities still persist -- rates are still highest…
lborkowski | February 29, 2016I've written before about the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, which in 2009 started providing free IUDs and contraceptive implants (the two forms of long-acting reversible contraception, or LARC) to low-income women at family planning clinics in 37 Colorado counties. Between 2008 and 2014, the state's teen birth and abortion rates both dropped by 48% (see this webinar for details). While teen birth rates have been declining nationwide in recent years, Colorado's decline was the largest.
LARC methods have become increasingly popular in the US over the past several years. This is likely…
kkrisberg | February 25, 2016Another day, another study on the potentially life-saving impact of vaccines. This time it’s a new study on the vaccine against human papillomavirus, or HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that can lead to cervical cancer. Earlier this week, researchers announced that since the vaccine came on the scene, rates of HPV among young women in the U.S. have plummeted.
Published in the journal Pediatrics, the study used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to analyze HPV prevalence among women ages 14 to 34 in the four years before the HPV vaccine was introduced in 2006 and…
lborkowski | February 8, 2016Since the start of 2013, Texas has excluded clinics affiliated with abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood affiliates, from receiving payment through the Texas Women's Health Program, which funds reproductive-health services for low-income state residents. The TWHP is the 100% state-funded program that replaced the 90% federally funded Women's Health Program -- because the federal funding meant Texas couldn't rewrite the rules regarding which providers could be paid through the program. These restrictions came on top of other cuts to family-planning funds that started in 2011 and…
kkrisberg | January 29, 2016In the midst of another national debate over gun safety regulations, some argue that higher rates of gun ownership will protect people from dangerous strangers with deadly intentions. Physician and public health researcher Michael Siegel set out to study that argument. He ultimately found no relationship between gun ownership and stranger-related firearm homicides. But he did find that gun ownership levels translated into higher homicide risks for one group in particular — women.
“Our data refute the hypothesis that the more guns out there, the more of a deterrent there is to strangers…
kkrisberg | January 28, 2016Each year, the U.S. spends $26.2 billion on costs associated with preterm birth — that’s birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy. Beyond the costs, babies born too early experience immediate and long-term problems, from developmental disabilities to asthma to hearing loss. For years, scientists have been studying possible environmental contributors, with many finding an association between preterm birth and air pollution. Earlier this week, a new study brought even more depth and clarity to this connection.
Published in the journal Environmental Health, the study found that exposure to high levels…
lborkowski | December 24, 2015During the holiday season, Kim, Liz and I are taking a short break from blogging. We are posting some of our favorite posts from the past year. Here’s one of them which was originally posted on May 26, 2015:
by Kim Krisberg
After 18 years as a professional house cleaner in the suburbs of Chicago, Magdalena Zylinska says she feels very lucky. Unlike many of her fellow domestic workers, she hasn’t sustained any serious injuries.
Zylinska, 43, cleans residences in the metropolitan Chicago area five days a week. An independent contractor, she cleans two to three houses each day. Fortunately, she…
kkrisberg | December 9, 2015As world leaders are gathered in Paris to discuss international efforts to combat climate change, Michelle Chen writes that workers in the Global South will “need to build livelihoods that can mitigate ecological crisis — and leap ahead of the dominant fossil-fuel based economies, which historically have both controlled and stifled their development.” Reporting for The Nation, Chen starts her article with a report from the New Delhi-based Just Jobs Network, which notes that climate-driven migration has the potential to drive down wages and working conditions in urban areas. Chen writes:
But…
kkrisberg | November 17, 2015For the first time since 2006, cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are on the rise, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency reports that while the sexually transmitted diseases continue to impact young people and women most severely, the recent increases were driven by rising disease rates among men.
Released just today as part of CDC’s Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2014 report, the data finds that chlamydia cases are up 2.8 percent since 2013; primary and secondary syphilis (the most infectious stages of the disease) are up 15.…